Taking a photograph of a group of people or a scene of interest whilst among friends is a common event and is often followed by a discussion on how best to distribute the photographs. In the modem world of digital image capture and web publishing, images are often uploaded onto web based photo albums and can easily be shared by referencing or following a well known URL combined with some form of access control such as use of a user ID and password. However, at the time of taking a picture, whilst the URL of the album is known and can be passed on, there is no easy way of providing fine-grained access control whereby persons involved in an image just captured can be given access to that image but not to other images in the album.
It is an object of the present invention to facilitate sharing of an image item with persons who were nearby at the time the image item was captured.